Amazon is launching Redshift, a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud for a starting price of under $1,000 per terabyte per year.

Redshift data can be analyzed using ‘normal’ SQL-based tools and business intelligence applications, and the clusters can be set up using a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Amazon anticipates customers starting with a few hundred gigabytes of data and scaling to a petabyte or more.

Redshift takes care of all the work of setting up, operating, and scaling a data warehouse cluster, from provisioning capacity to monitoring and backing up the cluster, and you can add capacity to a cluster without incurring downtime.

According to the info about Redshift, the service continuously monitors the health of the cluster and automatically replaces any component. The service is certified by Jaspersoft and MicroStrategy, with additional business intelligence tools promised soon.

Amazon Redshift uses columnar storage and data compression to reduce the amount of IO needed to perform queries, and makes use of local attached storage and 10GigE network connections between nodes to achieve its speed.

It also has a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture to support the ability to scale up or down without downtime. As with other Amazon services, you pay only for the resources you actually provision, with on-demand pricing starts at $0.85 per hour for a two terabyte data warehouse.

Amazon Redshift is currently in limited preview and there's a form to fill out to request and invitation.

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